Tuesday, March 21, 2017

Two GREAT Reads

Today starts
with Dr. Shoja and then Hudson (age 13) arrives to stay overnight whilst his mom
visits her mother. I won’t get down to work on the marble dress until Thursday.
I’m still reeling from the discovery that Seagram’s actually distributes their
font for free.

The marble
dress skirt will resemble the Seagram’s bag that every kid used for their
marbles when I was in elementary school and it has their logo prominently displayed
on it. I figured I would have to create the logo by hand until I happened to
discover the font. Praise Jesus. (I’m kidding.)

Besides being
thrilled with the font, I am thrilled to be trying something new with this
dress besides gluing marbles forever. I’m going to flock the dress to create a
new texture for my dress collection. My dress should look lovely and soft and
rich in texture when it is done.

I’ve already
started thinking about what to do for number ten. — and that’s disappointing; I’ve
just been through a week of stressful thinking about what to do for number
nine.

•

I am a man of
many heroes. Nothing pleases me more than a biography of a brilliant thinker
and it’s even better when the genius who’s captured my mind and imagination
happens to be gay. That was the case when I binge read everything by Oliver
Sacks and read the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Oscar Wilde.

On Sunday, I
read a truly remarkable long-form essay about Alexander von Humboldt. He was
called, during his lifetime, “the world’s greatest living man.” It is a review
and encapsulation of the book, The
Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of
Science, by Andrea Wulf. It’s published in the Sydney Review of Books. You
can read it here. It’s long but it’s delicious.

It’s absolutely
beyond me how this man is not widely known today when so many people whom he
inspired and with whom he collaborated are famous.

•

In college, I
took every course on Shakespeare offered. I visited Stratford Upon Avon, wrote
a competition to see a First Folio edition of his plays and even acted in two
of his plays. However, since graduating, I have not kept up with Shakespearean
scholarship so I was astounded to read these sentences in the February 19th,
2017, New Yorker:

The New Oxford Shakespeare, for which Taylor
serves as lead general editor, is the first edition of the plays to credit
Christopher Marlowe as a co-author of Shakespeare’s “Henry VI,” Parts 1, 2, and
3. It lists co-authors for fourteen other plays as well, ushering a host of
playwrights—Thomas Nashe, George Peele, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, George
Wilkins, Thomas Middleton, and John Fletcher, along with Marlowe—into the big
tent of the complete works.

It’s no longer controversial to give other
authors a share in Shakespeare’s plays—not because he was a front for an
aristocrat, as conspiracy theorists since the Victorian era have proposed, but
because scholars have come to recognize that writing a play in the sixteenth
century was a bit like writing a screenplay today, with many hands revising a
company’s product. The New Oxford Shakespeare claims that its algorithms can
tease out the work of individual hands—a possibility, although there are
reasons to challenge its computational methods.

I was astounded
to read how computer-based analysis of linguistic patterns of the writings of
all these authors mentioned facilitated the New Oxford Shakespeare’s
deductions. And to read why:

But there is a deeper argument made by the
edition that is both less definitive and more interesting. It’s not just that
Shakespeare collaborated with other playwrights, and it’s not just that
Shakespeare was one of a number of great Renaissance writers whose fame he
outstripped in the ensuing centuries. It’s that the canonization of Shakespeare
has made his way of telling stories—especially his monarch-centered view of
history—seem like the norm to us, when there are other ways of telling stories,
and other ways of staging history, that other playwrights did better.

This article,
too, is long but it’s a fascinating read. You can read it here.